Two Highly Popular African Christian Books: Snatched From Satan’s Claws & Delivered From The Powers Of Darkness

My criticisms of religion specifically center around what I think are dangerous beliefs they promote. Beliefs, when taken seriously, have deleterious effects upon society.

My recent talks in the UK focused particularly on the dangerous beliefs that were being promoted by the charismatic Christian belief system (Born-Again/Pentecostalism/etc).

I have always contended that charismatic Christianity plays an IMPORTANT role in promoting and reinforcing beliefs about the efficacy of witchcraft in this country. In this post, I am interested in presenting direct evidence of this contention. I will look at two widely read charismatic Christian books in Uganda (and sub-Saharan Africa).

Snatched from Satan’s Claws:

The book, “Snatched from Satan’s Claws”, was given to me by my mother two years ago. She felt that, being an atheist, I needed to be reminded of the threats we face as humans in this demon haunted world. Being reminded of these threats, she thought, might make me think twice about not accepting Christianity. She implored me to take seriously what was written in it.

Reading this book, I concluded that the authors of this book must either be deliberate liars or fraudsters; or they are insane and in need of psychiatric help. There is simply no other way to make sense of the blatant and outrageous assault on rationality that emanates from this book.

The book, co-written by Pastor D. D. Kaniaki and Evangelist Mukendi (from the Democratic Republic of Congo), is about Mukendi’s alleged ordeal as a former sorcerer, who later converted to Christianity.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

I was not the first born of my parents, but my father, a sorcerer and a witchdoctor, had had 13 other children, and he sacrificed them all, one by one, to the devil. When I was born mysteriously, it was not my mother who brought me up, for she was not allowed any access to me; I was breastfed and brought up by a mermaid.

In fact my conception and birth were through magic, and my Aunt Ndaya had helped my father in this. My mother had had difficulty in conceiving until my aunt met with someone who had obtained magical powers from a white man who brought them from Mount Calvary is Israel. He gave them to my father with a doll, a cross, and a long chaplet with instructions on how to speak to those flowers when he needed help, and that is how I was concieved.

Those magic items enabled my father to get connection with the mermaid who was to breastfeed and bring me up in the first few years of my life.

With those items, my father could perform great magical tricks. He could sever his arm from the rest of the body, and it would bleed, but he could easily put it back again. He could also drop himself on a pavement, divide himself into small parts, and reform his body again. He could become a goat with a human head, and walk on a bicycle, and so on.

Mukendi elaborates on what some of his abilities were, as a young sorcerer:

By the time I was an adolescent, I could fly abroad to any country where Lucifer commissioned me. I could make a helicopter out of a stick or my shoe and fly off to India, America, and back home. I could also change in to a fly and a take a rid on someone’s shoulders. The man would carry me for some distance, only for me to drop and walk in front of him without his knowledge. The following day, the person would feel sick and listless with pain in his shoulders because of my actual body weight on him.

I could also enter any house day or night and spy on people’s activities as I chose. I knew every open bedroom in homes. I could turn my self into a cockroach and rest near the fire place. I also knew how to transform one thing into another. I could turn a man into a goat for slaughter and eat him with a clear conscience. I was also skilled in using someone’s spirit when they were asleep to ride on as a horse all night long. By the time the man got up in the morning, he would feel plain all over the body because he acted as a human buffer or human shield for all the arrows aimed at me in the spirit world. This was particularly so if he was physically strong in the physical world. Even in the spirit world, he would appear strong and masculine. The victim would either fall sick or even die.

Yes, you heard right. Evangelist Mukendi claims that he could magically turn his shoe into a helicopter and fly to India, America and back home.

Of course, according to him all this is ‘evil’ and so he decides to turn over a new leaf:

The Lord Jesus Christ has saved me, and I wish to let you know how deep I had gone with Satan, as a lesson to deter others from falling into the same pit, and to show you Jesus is the only “Way, the Truth and the Life”.

I know there are many who are involved with witchcraft. If you are involved in any of the things that I will mention, repent and open your heart and ask the Lord Jesus Christ to save your soul.

Throughout this book, great emphasis is placed on how purportedly REAL the threat of witchcraft is, and how believers can protect themselves from its ill effects. He talks about his various adventures with Satan and his demons that were determined to keep him on the ‘dark side’. He also talks about how Satan has built a network of underground cities located in the former Zaire (modern-day Democratic Republic of Congo), one near the Inga dam and another near Matadi. It is stuff of pure fantasy, and yet it is swallowed wholesale as infallible truth, by millions of born-again Christians across Africa.

Delivered from the Powers of Darkness:

There is another extremely popular charismatic Christian booklet calledDelivered From The Powers of Darkness, by Emmanuel Eni, a West African evangelist.

In it, he also discusses his alleged life in the occult (as a witch) prior to his conversion to Christianity and a life of ministry thereafter. I first encountered this book when I was 15 years old when almost everyone in my high school was reading it. It is just as bizarre as Kaniaki and Mukendi’s – and also very widely read in Uganda.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter The Underworld Laboratories:

I stayed in Lagos for a week and went back to the sea , this time for two months . I went into the scientific laboratories to see what was happening. I saw psychiatrists and scientists all working very seriously. The work of these scientists is to design beautiful things like flashy cars, etc., latest weapons and to know the mystery of this world . If it were possible to know the pillar of the world they could have, but thank God, ONLY GOD KNOWS.

I moved into the designing room and there I saw many samples of cloth, perfumes and assorted types of cosmetic. All these things according to Lucifer are to distract men’s attention from the Almighty God. I also saw different designs of electronics, computers and alarms. There was also a T.V. from where they knew those who are born again Christians in the world. There you see and differentiate those who are church goers and those who are real Christians.

I then moved from the laboratories to the ‘dark room’ and ‘drying room’. The dark room is where they kill any disobedient member. They kill by first draining the person’s blood and then send the person to the machine room where he/ she will be ground to powder and then send the dust to the ‘sack room’ where they will be bagged and kept for the native doctors to collect for their charms.

There were more things which are hard to explain in writing. Despite all these powers in me, I was not yet qualified to meet with Lucifer but only qualified to be his agent.

Books like these bring to light an interesting phenomenon within charismatic Christian circles. There seems to be a correlation between a pastor’s claims of a dark and sinister past, and his perceived credibility and popularity among believers. Since most believers are in perpetual anxiety about witchcraft, it is easy to see how a pastor who claims to have once been a witchdoctor might appeal to them. Such a pastor would be seen as a person experienced with the inner workings of witchcraft, thus, in believers’ minds, qualified to prescribe appropriate courses of action to deal with the various problems they experience that they attribute to witchcraft.

By positioning themselves as the bearers of the solution for these alleged witchcraft-related problems, they gain influence, prestige, larger congregations, and – of course – more money.

And this is perhaps why these pastors talk and write books about witchcraft so much. By promoting and exaggerating the threats of this imaginary problem (witchcraft) they reap big from selling the imaginary solution (Jesus). Indeed they reap big. One only has to look at the kind of wealth accumulated by the purveyors of this form of quackery on this continent to see just how much they reap from their desperate, impoverished, followers.

A Growing Industry:

In their paper Religion and Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa, published in the Journal of Modern African Studies, researcher/historian Stephen Ellis and scholar of religion Gerrie ter Haar describe this growing cottage industry of highly mystical Christian books and pamphlets being published in Africa:

There is a thriving literature of religious tracts in Africa. The few formal bookshops, and the far more numerous market-stalls and itinerant hawkers who sell books, offer for sale pamphlets and popular works on religious subjects in every country of the continent, it would seem. Some are theological inquiries into aspects of the Bible or the Koran. Others contain moral lessons derived from these sacred books. Perhaps the most common category, however, is testimonies of personal religious experiences. Much of this literature hardly makes its way outside Africa and is only rarely to be found in even the finest Western academic libraries.

The most puzzling genre, at least for anyone educated in modern Western academies of learning, is that of the numerous works on witchcraft and other perceived forms of evil, sometimes in the form of a description of a personal journey into a world of spirits. While many pious works on Christianity on sale in Africa are authored by American evangelicals and published in America, popular books on witchcraft and mystical voyages are almost invariably written by Africans and published locally. Similar material is circulated through churches, sometimes in the form of video recordings. This is also true of African-led churches in the diaspora, among African communities on other continents. It is impossible to know with certainty how many people give any credence to stories like these, but the indications are that very many do so. Not only do pamphlets describing mystical journeys appear to circulate in large numbers, but such accounts may clearly be situated within an older tradition of stories about witchcraft and journeys into the underworld which is to be found in collections of folklore and even in the literature of high culture. Studies of churches and of healers in almost any part of Africa indicate that incidents of perceived witchcraft and of shamanism or near-death experiences are relatively common, and probably have been for as long as it is possible to trace.

Such evidence may be drawn not just from studies of the Pentecostal churches which have attracted so much scholarly interest of late, but also of many other sorts of church including African independent congregations, of Muslim communities and of indigenous religious traditions. Thus, the popular literature written by people who claim to have experienced spiritual journeys or to have expert knowledge of witchcraft is not, we believe, an ephemeral genre but rather represents a modern form of an important tradition of mysticism in Africa.

Consequences:

The obvious result of the pervasiveness of beliefs popular books like Snatched from Satan’s Claws and Delivered From the Powers of Darkness perpetuate is that it helps to sustain a state of constant anxiety and paranoia among believers, who fear that they are constantly being besieged by demons or evil spirits courtesy of witchcraft.

What is unfortunate, of course, is that whereas reason and science could otherwise be brought to bear to steer Africans away from this kind of thinking, the beliefs that inform this kind of thinking are being reinforced everyday by charismatic Christian churches, who have the means and the resources to promote their brand of extreme irrationality to an already gullible and superstitious public. Traditional animist beliefs thus end up being reinforced, rather than fazed out over time, which they should, given advances in science that explain a lot of the phenomena formerly attributed to evil spirits.

That said, it is quite likely that in the short term, the harsh economic and social realities on the ground will continue to keep Ugandans (and Africans everywhere) predisposed towards holding irrational beliefs about what causes their problems, and what they might do about them. Research does indicate a strong correlation between poverty, economic insecurity and religiosity, after all, so this is not surprising.

When desperate people are short of options, they will opt for whatever offers itself as a solution – and the less educated they are, the more irrational their preferred solutions will be. That’s probably why charismatic Christianity (Pentecostalism, in particular) is growing so rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa – and why belief in the efficacy of witchcraft thrives even today.

This is starting to make me wonder whether the cure for Africa’s obsession with mysticism might instead be economic and social empowerment, rather than sensitization campaigns by rationalists like myself and others at Freethought Kampala.

The Out Campaign

25 comments

I wish I could say your post has surprised me. I can’t. I am a long term fan of African news religious stories. Here’s a good one –

‘Magic penis’ killing set for trial date
The villagers, among them a community induna (headman), were arrested on February 24 after Albert Malwane, a pastor of the Izwi Zion Christian Church, was burnt to death a day before.

Mpumalanga police spokesperson Leonard Hlathi said that Malwane had been dragged from his one-roomed house in the Etitandini informal settlement near Jeppes Reef south of Malalane and taken to a hill, where he was set alight.

Malwane’s house was also burnt and his wife and daughter went into hiding.

Community members had accused him of talking to animals and using an invisible penis to sleep with women in the informal settlement.

They also accused his wife of turning into a snail and terrorising the community.

You have to laugh at these stories, or else you go insane. But they are sobering for those that think the obliteration of organised religion is a good thing. This is the result when you remove formal institutional frameworks of christianity – a free for all of non-denominational manaics totally free to invent whatever delusional and dangerous nonsense they please free from accountability. You probably know Helen Ukpabio, but your readers might not. I encourage people to google her, and search youtube as well. And she is only one of the better known ones.

It’s scary, scary stuff. And then you look to the west and what are secularists there doing? Arguing about the evil of cartoon character females having pink dialogue bubbles. Hard to decide which is worse in overall impact. It’s hard not to despair.

Hoggle, this stuff is exactly what organised religion peddles. Or didn’t you read about one Father Gabriele Amorth – telling all the world how Yoga and Harry Potter are of the devil?

That’s the good old fashioned Catholic kiddy diddling church for you.

Or how about that dominionist movement in the US – you know, beat your children with PVC pipe until they submit, and if a few die, well they rebelled themselves to death. That is your organised religion.

Or how about Imams who declare fatwas and start riots because somebody didn’t like their book or named a teddy bear Mohammed? That’s organised religion.

And so are these examples in Africa. So kindly take your organised religion and shove it where your head normally resides.

What? Amorth is a side show Catholic. It is a stretch to say he is representative. He is politely pushed off to the side by mainstream Catholicism like the embarrassing uncle that’s had too much sherry at crassmass dinner. The rest of your comment has no relevance to my point.

By “organised” religion I refer to institutional faiths that are hierarchical and expect accountability from their adherents – i.e. catholicism, mainstream Protestantism and much of eastern orthodoxy. Sure, there is no shortage of things things you can fault them on, but they have zero tolerance for people that babble about invisible penises and demonic snails. They do not promote creationism and are generally favourable to science and philosophy. They also do not burn people any more.

Dominionists, Reconstructionists, and the myriad of Charismatics etc. have NOTHING to do with any of these faiths. They are all bastard splinters of earlier movements such as Calvinists and Plymouth Brethren. They fall into the category of NON-DENOMINATIONAL, which I stated are the consequences of the failure of the mainstream faiths.

As for your Imams, they represent similar failures in Islam. The same type of fracture occurred there. The worst of the worst are the Salafists and Wahhabists that renounced and segregated from the mainstream Sunni – it is these maniacs that are responsible for almost all of the islamist idiocy you see in the world today. They are the islamic equivalent of xtian non-denominationals.

I had actually thought a lot about that, too. It’s difficult not to notice what madness ensues when authority over the interpretation of scripture is given to all people equally. When the word of an ordained priest is equal to lunatics like David Koresh, who was after all a fine example of someone who was “on fire” for Jesus, what else can be expected?

Funny how with all those powersd he had to join the god squad to become rich.
It’s hardly surprising that redempion lies work well; just look at American politics, where every Rethuglican wannabe has to claim s/he has worked their way up from upper-middle class indigent to super-rich demi-god thru ythe powers of the god-given free market. It’s just a good sell to people too downtrodden and under-educated to recognize bullshit when they hear it.

As a side point, don’t you find that logic and reason are almost useless in UG for combatting woo? The only (mildly) effective palliative is ridicule.
Thanks for the article.

I can see that u (responder) has been completely blinded and yo mind as well has been blocked by those demons from getin 2 know the truth i would say coz u have been raised in a secular world. Or else u are Satan’s commissioner as well, tryn 2 block others from knowin the truth. May the Lord Jesus christ help u 2 understand the comparison between spiritual n physical truth coz i know people believe by seeing and thus base their judgement/conclusion on what their physical eye tells ’em

I would not judge you as you have never experienced what others have experienced.My suggestion therefore would kindly be,refrain yourself from being judgmental to situations that are hypothetic to you.The secularism that blinded you from seeing the truth need to be waned out by asking yourself about your purpose in this world about others.Please,ask GOD to enlighten you for there are things in this world need to be spiritually asked to be revealed.In short,JESUS is the saviour.

The secularism that blinded you from seeing the truth need to be waned out by asking yourself about your purpose in this world about others

Truth like Helen Ukpabio and Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries? (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Ukpabio) Branding children as witches and turning them out on the street as pariahs to fend for themselves? 5 year old kids? Africa will never move forward as long as it keeps swapping superstition for superstition and ignoring civilisation. Your nonsense kills children, and your Ukpabio’s grow fat by exploiting your fear.

I am perplexed! Having read all your comments, i do not blame you for having the thoughts and opinions you shared. Your have every right to air your opinions; It is a free world.There is a Nigerian saying, “just because the blind man does not see the sun, does not mean that it doesn’t shine.” Just because you do not see it, neither have you experienced it, doesn’t make you an authority to decide that these things do not exist. Open your eyes, you sound educated and write impeccable English, but your ignorance, who can save you from it.
Your time of testing will come, if not immediately, then in the near future, and the same God you deny, you will cry out for help to Him. It is very understandable for men and women like you to deny God’s existence. But, when woe befalls you, the same Person you cry out to. Open your eyes, use your clever intellect. Don’t be blinded by the foolishness and ignorance present in the world today. Of books and philosophy there shall be no end, but where does your future lie? I wonder if you have ever asked yourself what shall become of you after your physical death? Do you think that you are just a piece of meat that roams the streets? What then is the difference between you and a corpse? Since when one dies, the body still retains its form, but where does that “you” that ate, spoke, laughed, cried go to?
You must understand that man is more than the meat you see, the flesh. Or does your philosophy not tell you that man has a soul? What is that soul then? I would that you Google on the recent and current scientific proof that man has a soul which survives death and once you discover this, let me see if you will still retain your atheistic philosophy. Probably that would set all of you in the trail of trying to understand what happens to that soul and where it goes after death.
It would be foolish for me to even start arguing to convince you that witchcraft is real. That is child stuff. What you should be thinking of right now is how to save yourself the eternal shame that shall come to you suddenly when you realize that all those “phantasies” you heard from the”noise making” preachers was, in fact, true.
To sum it up, better be a Buddhist, because at least they know about the causes of human suffering and how to alleviate them, than be a non-believing creature estranged from its maker. Better yet, Believe in the one God, who is able to save your sorry souls from the fires of hell.
Ciao.

I also think that if someone thinks that all these can be false then he is denying that the devil doesn’t exist. there is another person from Tanzania who was a devil’s agent who is now testifying what he use to do and how the use to plan to destroy christian families. this person is not a Kenyan but what he tries to explain from where he is looks the same to what we are seeing or undergoing in Kenya. He says that he was a leader in Africa that means that he could walk to every part of the world just like Emmanuel said. The devil is working not sleeping anymore so christians my fellow we need to pray every day without stopping because the bible must be fulfilled and is likely right now. Ma fellow christians be careful on what you say, how you dress, your language, how you eat and also how you pray.

the problem is that you guys are using your humanic understanding capacity which you got from human beings like you in schools and colleges which are based which exists only on physical world to describe and criticise things and systems that exists in the spiritual world.If you think all these people explaining the same thing about the spiritual war existing between THE HEAVEN`S KINGDOM vs THE DEVIL`S KINGDOM are insanes are then you have got to know that you are the 1 who is an INSANE. because you didnt tell us about who are these people working for. If its not JESUS who used them to make us know whats going on in these end-time days we are living then whom are they working for? Do you want to tell us that EMMANUEL ENI (delivered from the powers of darkness), IYKE NATHAN UZORMA (the grand occult now in christ) CHOO THOMAS NAM (heavens is so real) all these are working for the devil? how can the devil reveal his own secrets? what for? How can the devil show that JESUS is powerful than him? I dont think if you even had time to review the scriptures before writting this non sense post!u guys seems to know nothing about the scriptures thats you failed to defend your claims by using scriptures you just ended up in wasting our time by your long, non sense and saturnic coments trying to abstain the people from knowing the trueth about the devil`s kingdom! Wheather The devil is using you without your concern or be it you are doing this purposely! repent for standing against god`s `people because the main theme of their books to remind people that GOD(FATHER) exists, JESUS(THE SON), exists and the devil also exists and the end is nearby! thats what i can see in these articles that they are reminding people to stop sins and turn back their CREATOR! this is the main theme in all these articles now whats wrong with that?

Patricia Ninsiima
I want to thank God who has shown us the light about these truths. If you doubt then what even makes u doubt is what we call a conscience that yuo have the thought also makes you start to worry and that is why you think that these are not truths. You had better wake up and really early be the earlier the better trust me the fact that there is GOOD and EVIL that is evidence enough for you to start believing. The so called superstition you happen to call also the whites have like the man that wrote the satanic Bible got saved on his death bed a wwhite man my dear all of a sudden he felt that hell was real after all because he felt it on his death bed and he decided to give his life to Christ and from then he was completely healed.
I prayer is God show you the truth and you believe its not by force you know and so stop placing judgement on what you are not sure about. Jesus be your Guide and to the rest of us may Jesus continue to show us the the truth and that we grow in him. Amen

Patricia, thanks for such enlightenment.The devil will always try to portray that hell is not real and there’s nothing like heaven.His mission is to blindfold humanity in to continuing behaving recklessly in sin.The critics of the Gospel and love of God for mankind are in serious spiritual bondage.If only they could be honest enough and reveal to the world the kind of torture the devil is subjecting them to!These people suffer endless nightmares, rejection, sleepless nights, name it but they deny the power of God through Jesus Christ.We are living in the last days where people reject the truth but pay heed to seducing spirits.Let God have mercy.The Gospel of Jesus Christ is foolishness to those who perish.God bless you for such a brilliant response.

truth is stranger than fiction.
Just yesterday in tv, a local pastor was demonstrating the “annointing” power he had. He gave a young man a piece of cloth and told him to go wave it at some people. He did and the people he waved on collapsed under the so-called annointing.
I do not think these people were pretending to fall. I have no idea why they fell.
It could have been demonic power for all i know. So how can i or anyone else blatantly refuse to consider anything, no matter how illogical or crazed the idea is of someone travelling to india on a shoe?
Call it madness if you want. All i am saying is that there is something out there… probably a mermaid breastfeeding some hungry child.

Your article may make sense to other atheists like you so I’m not even surprised. The truth is, christianity doesn’t make sense, its outrageous and to your lot its ridiculous,even the miracles Jesus performed seem the same. My only hope and prayer is you find Jesus and turn your life around. it’ll do you a world of good.

l would like to have this book (snatched from the satan’s claws ) by email or l download it the way you have helped us get (Delievered from the powers of darkness ) from this page because sometimes the help us to know who about the world we a in and also how powerful our God(Jesus christ) is able to heal.THANKS

Revelation 12:11 and they overcame him by the blood of the lamb and by the word of their testimony. Heaven is real and so is hell I pray that Jesus opens your eyes to see and understand before its too late the lord bless you